How to Address Skill Gap if you Want to be a part of the Manufacturing Industry?8

With the advent of the manufacturing industry, an increased number of businesses is now looking forward to explore data and automation facilities to shore up productivity. As much heartening this current transition of the industry is in terms of growth, it also means that many manufacturing jobs are not only transforming but disappearing altogether as well.

Manufacturing Industry: What’s New? The “Old” Completely Annihilated?

With the disappearance of old skills, many new job responsibilities or rather designations have surfaced as well. And, this is what has led to the increased discussion about the skill gap which, at present, the manufacturing industry is grappling with.

The transformation of the industry is particularly marked by the rise of robots and increased use of software. IT Solution Architects, Industrial Data Scientists, Robot Coordinators and User Interface Designers are the new designations. Manufacturers are in need of mastering the ability to run these new tools to capture, evaluate and utilize the available data. They need to develop these skills in order to pave the way for career advancement.

Skill Gap: Need to be Addressed by Employers and Employees ASAP!

However – quite unfortunately enough the gap between the workers’ pre-existing knowledge and the new skills that they need to adopt is only widening. Needless to mention, this skill gap has lately emerged as a matter of concern today. As per the Global Robots Technology Market: Forecast 2014-2020, around a whopping 70% of the CEOs and manufacturing executives actually believe that employees have demonstrated serious lack of computer and technological skills.

What more? 78% of these CEOs and executives believe that the existing skill gap will impact the scope of introduction of new technologies in their businesses thereby limiting growth as well.

How can the new skills be developed?

Seasoned employees are required to learn new skills in order to continue contributing to the businesses. Right from company-funded to country-funded digital training – there is actually a lot of factors that will shape their learning.

Exposure to digital skills is all about learning ways in which they can implement their pre-existing factory experience and knowledge along with digital learning to embrace the newer avenues of business growth.

It is imperative on the companies’ part to provide digital training on a more expansive scale than what they already do. It will be impossible for them to implement Industry 4.0 without “people”. Machines alone can in no way help them scale the kind of growth that they would want to. In countries like Spain, it’s the governments that have stepped in to harness digital power by providing free or low cost training.

Besides company and country funded training, employees can also turn to online digital courses including:

Online classes conducted by reputed names like Coursera

YouTube Videos

Certification courses provided by equipment and software companies

Group resources

The companies themselves should be at the forefront of the digital transformation. They need to play a pivotal role when it comes to fostering digital knowledge – and before that inculcating a sense of immediacy with which digital learning needs to be pursued.